Making Politics Work: Practical Lessons on Politics for Would-Be Education Reformers

Making Politics Work

Making Politics Work

Practical Lessons on Politics for Would-Be Education Reformers

◉

Paul T. Hill and Ashley E. Jochim

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2025 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2025

Printed in the United States of America

34 33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83794-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83796-3 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83795-6 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226837956.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hill, Paul T. (Paul Thomas), 1943- author. | Jochim, Ashley E., author.

Title: Making politics work : practical lessons on politics for would-be education reformers / Paul T. Hill, Ashley E. Jochim.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2025. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024026612 | ISBN 9780226837949 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226837963 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226837956 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Educational change—United States—Planning. | Educational change—Political aspects—United States. | Educational change—United States—Longitudinal studies. | Educational planning—United States. | Portfolios in education—United States. | School management and organization—United States.

Classification: LCC LB2806.23 .H555 2025 | DDC 370.973—dc23/eng/20240718

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024026612

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Preface

1 · Why Politics

2 · The Portfolio Strategy in Theory and Practice

3 · Laying the Groundwork for Change

4 · Expanding a Base of Support and Mitigating Opposition

5 · Surviving the Expansion of Conflict

6 · How COVID Transformed Education Politics

7 · Making Politics Work

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

Preface

Politics has ruined many plausible education improvement initiatives by state and federal officials, foundations, local reform leaders, and unions. People with good ideas about how to improve schools more often than not are stymied by political pressures that stall implementation, limit their idea’s durability, and ultimately undermine its impact on educational outcomes.

Observers of these challenges have put forward many ideas to address them. Some say what is needed is to build policymakers’ and practitioners’ capacity to use and act upon evidence.¹ This, in their view, will bring clarity of purpose to education leaders and the communities they serve about the right way to improve schools. Others have asserted that because local education politics is intractable, the best one can do is to avoid it altogether by circumventing local political processes via state takeovers or by investing in private education alternatives, which in proponents’ views substitutes the logic of politics for one firmly rooted in markets.² A third perspective suggests that what is needed is better and more authentic community engagement under the guise that ideas rooted in the community are more likely to succeed politically.³ While we acknowledge these solutions can be tapped to overcome tough political circumstances, we believe they are also incomplete.

We wrote this book to give hope to would-be education reformers that, while politics is inescapable, it can be leveraged to support school improvement. As the pages that follow will attest, we see real value in infusing evidence into political debates, leveraging markets and state and federal power to advance reform agendas, and engaging communities. But these actions matter because they work with politics, not against them.

We have worked for ten years on exposing the sometimes-hidden politics of states, districts, and schools and showing how key actors, including philanthropies and elected officials, can use a better understanding of politics to advance the cause of school improvement. None of our previous work, however, has fully shown how those who seek changes to K–12 schools can be more effective at building durable support for initiatives and at anticipating and surviving opposition. Nor has it been able to draw from the experience of multiple localities attempting the same set of reforms over an extended period of time.

This book seeks to remedy both these deficiencies using a unique database drawn from the Center on Reinventing Public Education’s collaboration with school districts implementing the portfolio strategy. The portfolio strategy integrates several interdependent reform ideas including greater autonomy for public schools; transformation of the central office into a supporting, not controlling role; openness to new sources of educator talent; pupil-based funding for schools; public school choice; performance-based accountability; and the creation of new district-run and charter schools. Starting in the early 2000s, more than sixty localities, mostly central cities in metropolitan areas, engaged the strategy and attempted, with varying levels of effort, to make it work in their schools. Some places, including New York City, Denver, and New Orleans, made a great deal of progress in implementation, while others ran into trouble (usually in the form of determined local opposition) and abandoned it quickly. Our analysis draws lessons from both relative successes and dismal failures about how ambitious reform efforts can be built and sustained and how opposition starts small and builds over time.

Our analysis draws and builds upon the work of political scientists to understand the political successes and failures in districts that implemented the portfolio strategy. While we believe this book makes scholarly contributions to the academic literature on the politics of education policy, our primary aim is more practical: to help would-be education reformers better prepare themselves for the political work of reform. This book documents how reformers can expand their base of support and mitigate the impact of opponents who would like to see a reform fail.

There is wide agreement that addressing the gaps in opportunity facing American students will require changes in the ways public schools are funded, supported, and overseen, but there is also little sense of how to build the support necessary to make good on these things. This book provides a response to this problem. It shows how politics can undermine efforts to improve schools even when results are promising, and how future initiatives can better incorporate lessons learned about building local political support and managing opposition. We believe that public officials, foundations, and advocacy groups have been too optimistic about how a good idea will generate its own support and have not incorporated political thinking—about how to appeal to local actors who are initially indifferent, bypass or weaken opposition, and institutionalize support for the long run—into their design and funding of reform initiatives. We hope this book will lead both to more sophisticated thinking about the design, funding, and thoughtful long-term execution of K–12 reforms and to greater realism about the money and time required to fully implement and stabilize a reform strategy.

1

Why Politics

I’m not here for politics, I’m just for the kids.

School board member

In November 2021 Denver voters cast their ballots in an election widely considered to be a referendum on the city’s education reform strategy. For more than fifteen years the district had embraced a new model of urban district governance, emphasizing increased school flexibilities, choice for families, and performance-based accountability. When the votes were tallied, it was clear: Denver Public Schools’ long and ambitious run as an education reform leader was over. Seven union-backed board members, who campaigned on platforms that would undue much of what prior administrations had advanced, would take the helm of the district.

The reversal of fortune in Denver was not for lack of results. Graduation rates increased by nearly 30 percent and test scores were up significantly.¹ Yet these good results hadn’t translated into lasting political support. True, the district’s reforms found favor with some—among national foundations and state policymakers, as well as families and educators who benefited from new charter and innovation schools. But they were ultimately overwhelmed by many others, including teachers and their unions, parents frustrated with school closures and underresourced neighborhood schools, and left-leaning activists who viewed the district’s focus on choice and performance-based accountability as part of a corporate takeover of public education.

The waning of political support for Denver’s model of school reform is not unusual. Indeed, the history of public education is filled with examples of initiatives that failed not on the merits but as a result of their politics.

Is politics destined to overwhelm good initiatives and the leaders who embrace them? Some would say there is reform and then there is politics, and politics always wins. We disagree. Though there are times when opposition is very strong, no alignment of political forces is permanent, and there are things reformers can do to build support and weaken opposition. But it is true that reform is impossible without serious political thinking, anticipation of opposition and setbacks, adjustment in light of experience, and persistence.

Nobody Fully in Charge

In 1974, nine years after enactment of the first federal aid to education programs, RAND published its first change agent study report, explaining schools’ slow and sticky response to government efforts meant to dramatically improve K–12 public education.² This study provided empirical support for what many had long observed: schools were hard to change.³ Since then, a growing literature has documented the difficulties faced by those seeking to advance comprehensive and systemic efforts to improve public schools, whether by actions of government, private foundations, or local city leaders. Initiatives meant to transform whole districts or even states often leave behind few traces other than in a few schools that voluntarily embraced them.⁴ Consider some examples:

• Local systemic reforms featuring aligned curriculum, teacher training, daily scheduling, and student testing (e.g., Tony Alvarado’s New York City District 2 transformation and his similar initiative in San Diego), brought down by inter alia, conflict with teachers’ and principals’ views about what their children need and by high school parents’ objections to extreme standardization of content and method.⁵

• The Annenberg Challenge, which sought to leverage large outside investments and local initiative to spur improvement in nine city school districts, struggled in the wake of the competing interests and agendas of local nonprofits, city leaders, and school districts.⁶

• National Common Core standards in the early 2000s, which lost the support of teachers and their unions in the face of botched local implementation and concerns over the impacts of aligned assessments on teachers and students.⁷

• Alignment of teacher evaluation, staffing, professional development, compensation, and career-ladders as supported by the Gates Foundation and embraced by federal and state officials were abandoned after districts found that most principals and teachers didn’t trust the results and reverted to older informal practices, and unions organized against their implementation citing opposition to test-based teacher evaluations.⁸

• Personalization of instruction, a more recent foundation-sponsored initiative, which was not well implemented in districts receiving grants for that purpose, despite strong district and principal support, due to difficulties introducing new practices and gaining schoolwide adoption of ideas some teachers valued but others did not.⁹

• The Gates Foundation’s small high schools initiative, which ran up against practical questions about how to split up existing faculties and still have small high schools that could teach all subjects, and generated opposition from parents and teachers.¹⁰

None of these initiatives started as a partisan proposal, and all enjoyed a degree of support from education professionals. Their initiators, whether state or local administrators, foundations, or elected officials had reasons to expect they would work, including experience implementing them on a smaller scale, and plausible rationales based on the unacceptability of outcomes under the status quo. But each ultimately ran up against the reality that supporters’ commitment to change was no match for opponents who could resist, delay, isolate and ultimately press schools to move on.

The failure to sustain ambitious educational improvement programs through implementation has important implications for whether the United States can deliver on its aspirations for its public education system. Public education is the principal means for promoting upward mobility for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. States pay for thirteen years of full-time schooling, which is among the largest expenditure categories in every state’s budget. Yet none has been able to prepare even the majority of its children for success in college or careers, or to overcome the disadvantages experienced by children of color and those from low-income families, particularly in large cities and rural areas.

This is not for lack of effort. At least since A Nation at Risk was published in 1983, there has been pressure on federal, state and local policymakers to adopt school reforms to increase overall student achievement. The responses have varied: from school desegregation and finance reform initiatives, to statewide alignment of curriculum and teaching to student performance standards in the early 1990s, test-based accountability for students and teachers in the 2000s, and many local initiatives, particularly in large cities.

Though some state- and foundation-sponsored initiatives have produced promising improvements, most have been watered down, stalled before reaching full scale, or abandoned by their funders. This happens whether the reform initiative originates from within or outside the education profession and whether it comes from the left or right of the political spectrum. Even when reform initiatives have made a measurable difference, they have generated waves of opposition from teachers, unions, and parents who see changes in the schools as a threat to themselves. As this is written, some localities are pressing ahead with reform strategies, but most are threatened by organized oppositeion, defeat of elected officials who have supported them, and funder discouragement.

It is our contention that the key factor separating initiatives that endure long enough to achieve some of their goals from those that fade quickly or are never completely implemented is politics. Education is bound up with politics because it requires contributions from parents, teachers, employers, elected officials, and taxpayers. These all have different perspectives on what children need to learn and experience and different self-interests that color their thinking. Schools and districts don’t need to keep all those parties ecstatically happy, but none must become so unhappy that they withhold the resources they control, whether that’s enrolling their children, providing teaching, supporting taxation, providing city services, or something else.

While most observers of education reform implicitly understand that politics makes or breaks reform efforts, what to do in the face of tough opposition is a matter up for debate. One approach, embraced by many funders and federal policymakers, has focused on infusing more evidence into the education policy process. Congress, for example, sought to do this through its mandate for states and districts to use strategies grounded in scientifically based research.

Others have suggested that the failures of reform stem from their top-down nature. The antidote, in their view, is to allow initiatives to emerge more organically from local educators and parents, thereby immunizing them to political resistance.¹¹ As Andrea Gabor argues in After the Education Wars, successful reforms began as grassroots movements and grew out of rank-and-file educators’ passion for social justice.¹²

Still others have argued opposition to change is so entrenched that the best alternative is to simply circumvent the political process altogether.¹³ This line of thinking builds on an earlier influential book by John Chubb and Terry Moe, who argued that excesses of democracy make change too difficult and that the only way to transform K–12 education is to subject it to the discipline of markets.¹⁴ Others have sought to bypass local politics using authoritative solutions, thinking that aggressive action by state and federal actors—via carrots, sticks, legal mandates, and outright takeovers—can reliably overcome local opposition to change.

This book challenges these perspectives. It is true that politics presents many difficulties for those who seek to use reform to improve public schools. But, as we will show, the way to master these challenges is to deal with them directly by building supportive coalitions and weakening opponents’ claims rather than seeking ways around them. Ambitious reforms are possible if sponsors—whether local superintendents, foundations, or government leaders—anticipate the need to build political support gradually and proactively blunt and rebut opponents’ attempts to undermine them.

Efforts to build evidence and infuse it into political debates can help reform leaders make their case, adjust their course in the face of challenges, and show parents, teachers, and the general public that their ideas are having positive impacts. But evidence alone does not change material facts that animate politics on the ground—who wins, who loses, and why—nor will it transform hardened opponents into enthusiasts.

Likewise, grassroots consultation can help reform leaders build supportive coalitions in favor of their ideas and alert them to problems that need to be addressed to sustain support. But community sentiments seldom jell into coherent strategies all by themselves, nor do they automatically overcome the efforts of opponents to limit, stall, and water down otherwise good ideas that threaten their private interests in public education. Any reform that poses a threat to some—whether by taking away an advantage, requiring outside investments of time or money, or offending someone’s sensibilities—will require strategies to manage opposition.

People with ideas about improving schools sometimes try to overcome local resistance by strategically tapping authority that rests outside of local school district bureaucracies. They do this by turning to the courts, states, and the federal government or by empowering private actors via contracting and putting public education dollars directly into the hands of parents. These strategies can have short-term effects, but they do not provide reliable long-term solutions for escaping political pressures. Opponents can countersue, lobby state and federal policymakers, and appeal to voters directly. When these efforts are successful, reform ideas that never became rooted in the community can wither away.

While politics can constrain the set of alternatives that leaders may consider and may limit the pace of progress, we show there is much that leaders can do to build political support, manage the inevitable opposition, and sustain educational improvement initiatives over the long term. It is true that some groups are powerful and not easily overcome. But as the issues and circumstances evolve so do alliances and the influence of well-organized groups.¹⁵ And as Jeff Henig and colleagues have detailed, sometimes enough influential actors align around a reform strategy to overcome even well-organized opposition.¹⁶

Making Politics Work

Building better politics requires a shift in perspective. People with plausible ideas about how to improve schools often assume that an initiative will sweep all before it. Let teachers, or parents, or taxpayers see how effective the new program is, and they will embrace it. But that never happens—in part because nothing works perfectly, and some reforms are not strong enough to achieve their objectives; but even more because opposition and the lack of energetic supporters keeps reform initiatives from working as well as they could, and builds resistance based on collateral effects, for example, reallocation of money and jobs and threats to those who benefit most from existing ways of doing business.

Overcoming these challenges requires reformers to adopt longer time horizons than is typical. It is not enough to secure support for a new initiative or program because whether that initiative or program achieves its aspirations hinges on political challenges that emerge later. Reforms achieve success through the commitments of actors who support them and they endure when those commitments can be reinforced over time and protected from countervailing forces. As Eric Patashnik observes, successful reform turns on a reconfiguration of political dynamics.¹⁷

Strategies that are rich enough to solve deeply embedded problems, whether in social services or the economy, must have multiple reinforcing parts and take some time to show